....err Professor, yes your last sentence is correct, you could see that when Trickie-Dickie sensed that Ansett was in trouble and short on equipment, he aquired 6 or so (faclons zxa, zxb etc) from BA and just flooded the trunk routes, so yes your theory of market forces is correct, Ansett needed equipment badly but no decisions were being made from the people with their hands on the levers and we know who they were by then and the management by then were paralyzed with incompetence.
Ansett problems started when by sheer magic Mr Keating decided to merge TAA and Qantas, so with a wave of wand, TAA became Qantas and the 750 million dollar debt that TAA had was just miraculously wiped of the slate. Here now Ansett was no longer on a level playing field, Qantas was handed a huge present and now the gov/taxpayer became a huge stake holder in Qantas.
So the motive of looking after Qantas has now became huge from the gov's point of view, Virgin was on the scene and this started to play into the gov hands, to look after Qantas and a low cost carrier in a deregulated market was a nice fit, in fact a strong Ansett with SQ's backing would be a huge threat.
ANZ were children in a mans game, they hated Ansett for ever going to NZ and start Ansett New Zealand on their turf, it was payback time, thanks to TNT, they aquired their half share, but everybody forgot that ANZ had the pre-emptive right to buy the 2nd half of Ansett, which to everyones disbelief they excersized that right, News Corp knew this, and why did News rather sell to SQ than to ANZ, after all SQ was offering 500 mill and ANZ finally paid 650 mill.
News was keen to sell and took the money and ran, now ANZ had this huge airline but could not afford it, meanwhile Trickie-Dickie had the gov. on side to protect Qantas. the gov. wasn't going to get rid of Ansett, but they made sure that would not be any help from them either, it was all goint to go to protect Qantas.
Had SQ got Ansett, then Ansett would have been a major player, in Australia and overseas, the level plying field would have been there with Qantas, but what transpired, it was doomed to failure with idiots like ANZ running things, look at the result, the New Zealanders spent 1.3 billion dollars on the Ansett debacle for zip, nothing to show for it except no Ansett to compete with on the Pacific.
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